


ruby, blue & green; neon too

by perennial



Category: Rogue One: A Star Wars Story (2016), Star Wars - All Media Types, Swan Lake & Related Fandoms
Genre: F/M, Fairy Tale Retellings, but they’re murdered by the redemption arc lurking around the corner, everything i write turns into a persephone au, orson krennic needs therapy, swan lake AU, tfw you try -again- to write a morally ambig character
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-01-15
Updated: 2018-01-15
Packaged: 2019-03-05 00:08:54
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,530
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13375959
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/perennial/pseuds/perennial
Summary: And I've been waiting for you all this timeI adore you, can't you see, you're meant for me?Swan Lake AU.





	ruby, blue & green; neon too

**Author's Note:**

> [{Salvatore}](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mZ5C9EQAeKo)

Cassian takes leave of her with a fervent kiss on the cheek and an earful of promises. He clutches her wrists even as the beam pulls her back into the spacecraft.

“I’ll be ready,” he tells her, dark eyes earnest, “with all the scientists required to break this link. You’ll never have to return to him again.”

Jyn has no reason to doubt his word. He’s a senator now, with resources at his disposal.

Much has changed in three years.

He says, “Tomorrow—”

The pod door whisks closed on his face without ceremony.

For a moment the capsule is dark; then dotted lines of white light race up the walls to gather above her head. The pod glows faintly blue. She can feel the ship rising, rotating, wings lifting, gathering speed.

Exactly two minutes pass before the pod shishes open to release her into the belly of the craft. She goes to the window bay and watches the universe sweep past in a blur.

The ship completes the jump and the surrounding galaxy appears: thousands of orbs and specks suspended in an expanse of black and blue. A yellow, looming sun fills the cabin with light. The nearest planets are purple and green, red and white; familiar sights all. A small blue dot in the distance rapidly grows larger.

The _Swan_ drops through the atmosphere of the blue planet and pulls up to drift over its aquatic surface until reaching a large steel rig. A massive door drops open to admit the ship, which is slowly drawn up into the docking bay. Jyn listens to sounds she could recreate in her dreams: the shift of metal as the ship is pulled into position and anchored to the dock. The hissing release of air as the oxygen levels in the cabin are analyzed. The approving buzz of the ship door, opening to the vast, bustling hangar floor. The cacophony of beeps and hums and clangs produced by a brigade of industrious droids. The voice of her jailer.

“This is my reward for giving you even an inch of freedom!” he yells from his overlook in the control riser, the pulse point of the hangar. He is already in full swing, she sees: droids are working busily from a set of kyber-light blueprints, though what he is creating she cannot determine from this distance.

She crosses her arms. “You couldn’t even give me five full minutes. I haven’t seen him in two years.”

His cape billows out as he storms down the stairs to her. The droids swerve away from him as he advances. Jyn stands in the center of the hangar and waits. He doesn’t stop until they are nearly nose to nose.

“Tomorrow,” Krennic spits. His hair is disheveled, as though he’s been running his hands through it in frustration: his own particular coping mechanism. His eyes are glacial blue, belying the burning anger that is, as now, so frequently present in them. “One thing, _one thing_ will secure your freedom. And it is not a thieving ex-assassin posing as your benefactor.”

“Miss me, will you? I knew it.” She asks the nearest droid, “Is there food in my chamber? I’ve a feeling I won’t be welcome at supper.”

Krennic isn’t finished; he seems determined to lose his temper. “Try to outsmart me and I assure you, the only thing you will achieve is a bullet in your lover’s head! You think your time here has given you rights, that you have a say in what happens. Don’t forget for a moment who is in command here! I will wring that intel from your brain if it’s the last thing I do. Mark my words! You aren’t going anywhere!”

“Irritable,” Jyn remarks. “Have you been practicing your empathy like I told you?”

“Out!” he shouts. “OUT!”

“Miss Erso?” says the droid, and she nods to indicate she will go without protest.

Krennic climbs back up to the station and unleashes a storm on the worker droids, who chirp back _yes sir_ s and briefly pretend to work faster. Jyn can feel his eyes on her and pauses to look up at him, wondering if the unhappiness on his face is reflected in hers.

She follows her escort droid through the rig to the outer bridges. The sun has set and nearly all the light has gone with it. A night wind teases at her hair. In the moonlight the crystalline seas of the planet turn silver.

The route to her quarters leads her past floating warehouses of stockpiled kyber. Krennic doesn’t know how grateful she is for this fact, a detail to which he has probably never given a single thought. At her lowest and weakest, it has been the kyber and nothing else that has kept her mouth shut and her father’s secrets safely locked in her mind. 800 million units of kyber crystals, waiting to lay waste to the galaxy, and her resolve is all that stands between the two.

Her chamber is meant to be a taunt. The ceiling, floor, and all four walls are made of thick, perfectly clear plastic; it floats on the surface of the water-planet, partially submerged. Through the lower half she can watch schools of fish dart past, or pods of dolphins hunting them, or whales and turtles in no hurry to do anything at all. Through the upper she can see hundreds of planets spinning before the swath of star-roads. Her walls are windows to all the escape routes she cannot take.

“Miss Erso,” her escort droid says politely, then locks her in.

She goes to a small table in the corner and presses the button of a hand-sized disc. A hologram of her father ripples into being. She carries it to the larger table and sets it there while she fixes and eats supper.

The ache of losing her father has dulled into a quiet resignation. The bitterness that was like acid in her heart is gone. The solitude of her captivity has allowed her the focus needed to process her grief and cultivate the lessons he left her. From his life: kindness, devotion, attentiveness, gratitude; sacrifice. She has unlearned the anger she learned from his long absence. In death, he has taught her that brilliance is a double-edged sword: there are so many wonderful, devastating things a single mind can unleash on multitudes.

But most of all:

Patience.

She sits in the center of the room with her legs crossed and breathes in, out, in, out. She tracks her heartbeat in every section of her body. She listens to the lap of water against the glass walls of her prison. She used to watch Chirrut perform centering exercises like these. Three years ago she found them amusing.

Then she curls up on her bed and watches the whirling, shining stars until her eyes drift closed.

0 0 0

Jyn is late to breakfast; by the time she arrives, Krennic has finished eating and moved on to tea. He has bathed and changed clothes since she last saw him. He greets her pleasantly, with a gleam in his eyes that means that whatever he was working on the night before has been a success.

“Would you like to see what I’ve made?”

She is determined to not show any interest in whatever he wants to show her—until she sees it, and then she is too stunned to say or do anything at all. He watches, pleased by her reaction.

“How?” she breathes.

A woman in white. A woman with her face.

She knows it’s a droid, but a voice in the back of her head cannot help wondering if somehow he’s managed to steal her genetic code and clone her.

Her droid-self meets her gaze levelly. There is no haughtiness in the look, or malevolence, or cunning—none of the attributes she would have expected him to bequeath to an image of herself. Instead she sees a blend of concentration and contentment she remembers gracing her father’s face, back in the days on Lah’mu.

“This is what I look like to you?”

He frowns. “This is how you are. Why, what’s wrong with it?”

Jyn circles the droid, taking her in from all sides. The clothing is hers—he probably looted her wardrobe—and she doesn’t want to know where he got the hair, which looks real. Even the skin looks real, though she knows from past experiments that it is a rubbery compound. She casts a look at the droid’s lower half and raises an eyebrow at its creator.

“Oh, don’t look at me like that.” He shows her what the cloth hides: a smooth expanse of metal.

Her eyes skim over the figure and locate: a blaster, throwing daggers, a pair of sai, grenades, and an A180 pistol.

“You’re going to try to kill him.”

“If all else fails. Bringing him back here to talk reason into you is preferable. Nor will it be me doing it.”

“Nor I. It will be _this_.”

“It can be you on that ship instead, Jyn. _Just—tell—me_.”

“What makes you think one life outweighs the balance of millions, to me?”

“Pretend all you like; I know what he means to you.”

“And what will you do if I give you what you want, Orson? Who will you go conquer? The galaxy is at peace. It doesn’t want your bloodshed or your greed.”

“I didn’t ask your opinion. I’m not having this conversation again.”

“And if you do somehow manage to stir it all up again, what then? How long will you try to fill your empty soul with empty things?”

He is clenching his jaw in that way she knows better than her own face. “Take her away,” he grates, waving an impatient arm at a nearby droid.

She keeps talking even as their metal fingers close around her arms, even as they drag her out of the hangar. “Do you know what I think? I think the walls you’ve built around yourself are just as invisible and just as strong as the ones you’ve kept me inside. And this, this _obsession!_ It’s just as much a decoy as that thing of me you’ve made, but the only one you’re lying to is yourself!”

The door slams shut, blocking off the sight of his back, his balled fists, his head turned away from her.

0 0 0

She thinks of Galen. Of sacrifice. She imagines herself floating on water instead of being worn away by it.

Through her ceiling she watches the _Swan_ rise from the rig and fly away.

She thinks of the droid’s face. To recreate that expression requires an understanding of it. If he can understand that, if he understands her kindness, something must have planted itself in his heart, even if he doesn’t know it.

“I wanted to take a nap today,” she tells Galen’s hologram. She pulls on her jacket; then it’s the work of a moment to overwrite the lock system on her door. Thanks to two years of trial and error she knows where every security camera in the rig is located, so those are easy to dodge, and soon she is back in the hangar with no one the wiser. The hangar is nearly empty: droids on missions roll past, but Krennic will be monitoring the _Swan_ and its contents from the control tower.

Within minutes she is airborne and en route to Cassian.

0 0 0

She arrives with seconds to spare. The _Swan_ is still landing. Jyn’s smaller, lighter craft skids to a haphazard halt. She tumbles out just as the droid emerges from the starship.

A group waits on the tarmac; Cassian stands some yards in front of them. At the sight of two Jyns, his eyes nearly fall out of his head.

She runs toward the droid, yelling to Cassian: “I didn’t have time to tell you yesterday but I don’t actually need to be rescued. It means a lot that you care, though, and that you wanted to try. Just a mo!”

She leaps toward the droid, who is already raising its blaster at her, and scrabbles for the power switch hidden behind a rubber ear. Her fingers find it a millisecond before the droid fires; the blaster shot hits the ground a few feet away as the firing arm automatically lowers. The droid’s face goes empty and its shoulders straighten into rigid perfect posture.

Jyn hurtles into the ship to disable the tractor beam and remote surveillance monitors. She takes a moment to catch her breath and goes back outside.

Cassian is standing in front of the droid, frowning. K-2SO has joined him and is prodding at the decoy’s rubber nose. “What in the fourteenth galaxy is going on?”

“Krennic wants intelligence I won’t share with him so he wants to bring you back to his base to torture you so that I’ll give in. This is a decoy sent to collect you. Not his worst idea, really, if a bit lazy.”

“I’ll go with you, certainly,” he says fiercely. “Let Krennic see what happens when he kidnaps my friends—”

“Absolutely not. I don’t want the two of you anywhere near each other. The situation is under control. Besides, I told you what I meant to do back when I left.”

He looks bewildered. “Yes, but it’s been two years.”

“These things take time.”

He frowns, but it’s from concern for her. “How much more time do you think you’re going to need?”

“Difficult to say.”

K-2SO says, “She’s afraid she’s failed.”

Jyn scowls at him. “I wondered when you would pipe up.”

Cassian says carefully: “I think two years is long enough to know if he’s permanently gone to the bad or if there’s hope.”

“There is always hope.”

“Love can’t fix everything, Jyn.”

“I’m not willing to give up yet.”

“Liar. You’ve wanted to give up since the first day you arrived, haven’t you? You’re just too stubborn to quit.”

She laughs, but lowers her voice to say: “What if I’ve failed, Cas?”

“You’ll come home. And you'll clear all your crap out of my storage locker that’s been taking up all the room for three years.”

She hugs him fiercely. “Pass it on to Chirrut and Baze and Bodhi.”

“They’d prefer it from you. We miss you. Come back to us. Soon, Jyn, please.”

She nods, not trusting her voice. K-2SO salutes her and she returns the gesture, even flashing him a smile, because she’s missed this know-it-all composition of metal more than she’s realized. She’s missed this duo, she’s missed her unit, she’s missed being there to observe their hijinks or participate in them or plot the next one. She’s missed having a home. Strange, to have spent most of her life alone and on the run, and just a taste of the opposite has made an addict of her. Seeing them has brought to vivid, fiery life the heartache she’s been carefully suppressing for two years.

She hugs Cassian once more for good measure, then boards her craft and takes off in the direction of the water planet.

0 0 0

Every droid in the rig must be gathered on the hangar floor—that is, every droid except those who have already marched (or rolled) into the cargo bays of five starships. A cool dozen droids made of dull black metal are grouped near Krennic, who is overseeing the loading process with unconcealed impatience.

Jyn steps out of her little craft to face the business end of Krennic’s blaster. She tugs up her sleeve to show him an arm made of muscle and bone. He stares at her: a mix of anger and disbelief.

She holds up her empty hands. “All this for me? I knew you would miss me. Why don’t you admit it for once and for all?”

He lowers the blaster and blinks. He strides toward her, grips her by the chin, and studies her face. Once satisfied she is indeed human and unarmed, he drops his hand and holsters the blaster.

“How?” he demands.

“My father designed half this rig. And he left me all his notebooks, which I had ample time to study before you, ah—caught me. Do you really think I couldn’t free myself anytime I chose?”

He looks annoyed. “Then why did you stay?”

“You’ll have to figure that one out on your own, Orson.”

“Why didn’t you stay with Andor?”

“I wasn’t ready to forego the pleasure of your company. Though I see it wouldn’t have made a difference. Going to send the whole fleet to hunt me down, were you?”

“Not precisely. That is, I built the droid so quickly I forgot to write a code that would prevent it from attacking you. More to the point, I assumed I would arrive mid-battle, and I didn’t feel like getting shot.” He indicates the collection of bodyguard droids.

Krennic turns toward the assembly massed in the hangar and roars, “Cancel procedure. Resume your stations.” The droids stop and turn around and begin filing out of the ships, back into their various assigned levels of the rig.

He turns back to her and studies her face, a slight frown between his brows. He presses, “Why have you stayed, Jyn?”

She looks away, pretending to watch the dispersal of the droids. “I’ve been waiting.”

“For?”

She breathes in, out. She raises her eyes to his. “I know you have a heart, Orson. A small, shriveled one, true, but I know it’s there. I’ve been hoping your heart would win out over your thirst for glory.”

He stares at her. “And if it doesn’t?”

“—I leave.”

“And if it does?”

“I leave.” She says it like a sigh.

He’s assessing everything: her words, her expression. There is a strange new light in his eyes that she doesn’t know how to interpret. She finds she can’t hold his gaze and watches the droids over his shoulder instead.

“Alone?”

Her eyes jump to his. “Remains to be seen.”

Jyn has been the target of Krennic’s complete focus at various times in the past, but always during some type of interrogation. It isn’t so unpleasant, she finds now, when the energy behind his eyes is all anticipation, curiosity, hunger.

“How will you know?”

She pulls a slip of paper out of her pocket: folded just once; torn from a ship’s manifest and sketched on little more than an hour ago.

His lips part. He doesn’t take it from her fingers, though, even though he most certainly knows what it is. His head tilts back to study her.

“You’re bluffing.”

The calculating look is a familiar one, now. She feels every hope in her heart unravel; the last two years collapse into nothingness. And he says:

“But if I go with you, and make you trust me, someday you’ll tell me the truth.”

She swallows hard, trying to conceal the disappointment sweeping through her. Wrong, she has never been so wrong, she wants to stab him in his withered heart, she can’t understand why he would expose his plan, especially when she knows it would have worked.

He says: “And then you’ll never trust me again. And you’ll leave for good, and I’ll never see you again, no matter how many droids I send to search. I find I’m not keen on the idea whatsoever.” His voice is steady, matter-of-fact, and his eyes are frank. “So what shall we do? What would you have me do to keep your trust intact?”

Her mouth trembles but she doesn’t hesitate. “Destroy all the kyber. Every last unit.”

“Agreed. Though we’d better do it quickly, before I start rationalizing why it might be best to keep some.” He looks at her face. “It’s nice to know I can still surprise you.”

She laughs shakily. “Are you sure you aren’t a droid, yourself?”

“Shall I prove it to you?” He takes her hand and lays it on his chest where she can feel the thud of his heart. He watches her face. “What do you feel?”

“Possibilities.” She looks up at him.

“Well, I’m in need of a new project, now that my latest one has come to an abrupt end. Shall we give it a go?”

She nods, throat tight.

“Well then.” He turns toward the exit that leads to the kyber warehouses.

She tugs on his arm to pull him back toward her. And he must have wanted this as badly as she, based on the speed with which she finds herself enclosed in his arms and being thoroughly kissed.

When they surface for air a few minutes later, she tells him, “I have explosives stashed on your old shuttle.”

“Of course you do,” he says, with a chuckle that makes her momentarily forget the topic at hand. He takes her face in his hands and kisses her briefly, affectionately.

“Would you like to do the honors?” he asks. She grins at him and begins shouting orders to the droids, and when he takes her hand in his she can feel the pulse at his wrist, pumping life, hope, possibilities.


End file.
